Related papers: Robust Markov Decision Processes on Continuous Sta…

We consider synchronizing properties of Markov decision processes (MDP), viewed as generators of sequences of probability distributions over states. A probability distribution is p-synchronizing if the probability mass is at least p in some…

We study infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the decision maker evaluates each of her strategies by aggregating the infinite stream of expected stage-rewards. The crucial feature of our approach is that the aggregation…

Interval Markov Decision Processes (IMDPs) are finite-state uncertain Markov models, where the transition probabilities belong to intervals. Recently, there has been a surge of research on employing IMDPs as abstractions of stochastic…

Many control problems in environments that can be modeled as Markov decision processes (MDPs) concern infinite-time horizon specifications. The classical aim in this context is to compute a control policy that maximizes the probability of…

In this work we investigate an importance sampling approach for evaluating policies for a structurally time-varying factored Markov decision process (MDP), i.e. the policy's value is estimated with a high-probability confidence interval. In…

We introduce a framework for approximate analysis of Markov decision processes (MDP) with bounded-, unbounded-, and infinite-horizon properties. The main idea is to identify a "core" of an MDP, i.e., a subsystem where we provably remain…

Value iteration is a well-known method of solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that is simple to implement and boasts strong theoretical convergence guarantees. However, the computational cost of value iteration quickly becomes…

We consider the problem of designing policies for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with dynamic coherent risk objectives and constraints. We begin by formulating the problem in a Lagrangian framework. Under the assumption that the risk…

Interval Markov decision processes are a class of Markov models where the transition probabilities between the states belong to intervals. In this paper, we study the problem of efficient estimation of the optimal policies in Interval…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has exceeded human performance in many synthetic settings such as video games and Go. However, real-world deployment of end-to-end RL models is less common, as RL models can be very sensitive to slight…

Large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) require planning algorithms with runtime independent of the number of states of the MDP. We consider the planning problem in MDPs using linear value function approximation with only weak…

In classical reinforcement learning, when exploring an environment, agents accept arbitrary short term loss for long term gain. This is infeasible for safety critical applications, such as robotics, where even a single unsafe action may…

We consider the task of estimating a structural model of dynamic decisions by a human agent based upon the observable history of implemented actions and visited states. This problem has an inherent nested structure: in the inner problem, an…

We study policy optimization problems for deterministic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with metric state and action spaces, which we refer to as Metric Policy Optimization Problems (MPOPs). Our goal is to establish theoretical results on…

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with an unknown cost function and employ stochastic convex optimization tools to address the problem of imitation learning, which consists of learning a policy from a finite set of…

In this paper, we propose a general theory of ambiguity-averse MDPs, which treats the uncertain transition probabilities as random variables and evaluates a policy via a risk measure applied to its random return. This ambiguity-averse MDP…

Markov decision problems (MDPs) provide the foundations for a number of problems of interest to AI researchers studying automated planning and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we summarize results regarding the complexity of solving…

We present a general framework for applying machine-learning algorithms to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of these techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive exploration of the…

We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) which are a standard model for probabilistic systems. We focus on qualitative properties for MDPs that can express that desired behaviors of the system arise almost-surely (with probability 1) or…

Decision-making under distribution shift is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment environments differ. We study this problem through the lens of robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), which…